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$25 Gun Created With Cheap 3D Printer Fires Nine Shots (Video)

The Lulz Liberator, a working handgun printed on a $1,725 LulzBot 3D printer with $25 in plastic. Click to enlarge. (Credit: Michael Guslick)

When high tech gunsmith group Defense Distributed test-fired the world’s first fully 3D-printed firearm earlier this month, some critics dismissed the demonstration as expensive and impractical, arguing it could only be done with a high-end industrial 3D printer and that the plastic weapon wouldn’t last more than a single shot. Now a couple of hobbyists have proven them wrong on both counts.

One evening late last week, a Wisconsin engineer who calls himself “Joe” test-fired a new version of that handgun printed on a $1,725 Lulzbot A0-101 consumer-grade 3D printer, far cheaper than the one used by Defense Distributed. Joe, who asked that I not reveal his full name, loaded the weapon with .380 caliber rounds and fired it nine times, using a string to pull its trigger for safety.

Joe’s proof-of-concept could raise the stakes another notch in the growing controversy over 3D printed guns, an idea that threatens to circumvent gun control and let anyone download and create a lethal weapon in their garage as easily as they download and print a Word document. The first successfully fired 3D-printed gun that Defense Distributed revealed to Forbes earlier this month, dubbed the Liberator, was printed on an $8,000 secondhand Stratasys Dimension SST printer, a refrigerator-sized industrial machine. In testing, that prototype has generally only been fired once per printed barrel. The gun printed by Joe, which he’s nicknamed the “Lulz Liberator,” was printed over 48 hours with just $25 of plastic on a desktop machine affordable to many consumers, and was fired far more times. “People think this takes an $8,000 machine and that it blows up on the first shot. I want to dispel that,” says Joe. “This does work, and I want that to be known.”

Eight of Joe’s test-fires were performed using a single barrel before swapping it out for a new one on the ninth. After all those shots, the weapon’s main components remained intact–even the spiraled rifling inside of the barrel’s bore. “The only reason we stopped firing is because the sun went down,” he says.

Just how the Lulz Liberator survived those explosions isn’t exactly clear. Joe claims that the plastic he used, the generic Polylac PA-747 ABS fed into most consumer 3D printers, is actually stronger than the more expensive ABS plastic used in a Stratasys printer. In fact, before using a Lulzbot-printed barrel, he and Guslick tested one made on Guslick’s Stratasys printer. That barrel exploded on firing, though Joe blames the problem in part on its having been printed with a smaller chamber, the space at the back of the barrel into which the round is inserted.

Joe’s printed gun contains a few more pieces of metal hardware than the original Liberator. Rather than print plastic pins to hold the hammer in the body, for instance, he used hardware store screws. Like Defense Distributed’s gun, the Lulz Liberator also uses a metal nail for a firing pin, and includes a chunk of non-functional steel designed to make it detectable with a metal detector so that it complies with the Undetectable Firearms Act. The rifling that Joe added to the barrel is designed to skirt the National Firearms Act, which regulates improvised weapons and those with smooth-bored barrels.

Still, Joe’s cheap homemade gun isn’t without its bugs. Over the course of its test firing, Joe and Guslick say it misfired several times, and some of its screws and its firing pin had to be replaced. After each firing, the ammo cartridges expanded enough that they had to be pounded out with a hammer. “Other than that, it’s pretty much confirming that yes, Defense Distributed is correct that this functions,” says Guslick. “And it’s possible to make one on a much lower cost printer.”

When Defense Distributed founder and anarchist Cody Wilson set out to create the world’s first 3D-printed gun last year, he told me at the time that his focus was on making guns as widely accessible as possible via the Internet, a move he believed would demonstrate governments’ inability to control digital objects. He planned to eventually adapt his model to be printable on a sub-$1,000 printer known as a RepRap. “Anywhere there’s a computer and an Internet connection, there would be the promise of a gun,” Wilson said at the time.

Joe’s experiment brings that idea of a universally-available gun with uncensorable online blueprints one step closer to reality. “I’m trying to do the same thing Cody wants to do. I’m not an anarchist, but I don’t like the idea that the government is telling us ‘You can’t have that,’” he says. “I agree with Cody’s idea that this is a perfect fusion of the first and second amendments.”

Of course, there’s a certain thrill of pioneering a new gun design, too, Joe admits. “I may be the first person in the history of mankind to fire a bullet through a plastic rifled barrel. It’s an interesting feeling,” he says. “I feel like Samuel Colt.”

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My last paycheck was $7500 working 12 hours a week online. My sisters friend has been averaging 11k for months now and she works about 20 hours a week. I can’t believe how easy it was once I tried it out. The potential with this is endless. This is what I do, Rich4.Com_

more irrational fear about guns.so the guy made an extremely expensive zip gun.good for him.there’s nothing practical or special about what this man has done.this all falls right into the same category that glock handguns did in the 80′s.when Gaston Glock introduced his model 17 handgun to the US in the mid 80′s anti-gunners came out of the woodwork saying it was the perfect terrorist weapon because according to them it was entirely made of synthetic plastics.they ranted that it would easily pass through metal detectors and x-ray machines so terrorists would be able to hijack flights at their own wim.problem was that the slide,barrel,recoil spring,magazine spring,many of the major internals in the frame,and not to mention the ammunition would have sent all the x-rays and metal detectors in the world off.

Actually, you seem to be missing the point. All of us rational people know that for the past 500 years you could make a function handgun from metal scrap. That in the past 100 years you could travel no more than 20 miles to a store and for less than the cost of lunch at the given time period, have a working gun. We all know this… This is not for us.

This aptly named “Liberator” (see WWII reference) is designed to show the pointlessness of Gun Control to people who don’t “get” it. The people that think guns are evil talismans that only evil companies can provide to people.

This proves that magazine limits are pointless as people can print functional and constantly improving magazines. It proves handgun bans are pointless because this is a tiny concealable handgun for $25 or so. It proves that “Assault” weapons bans are pointless because the parts needed to “convert” a hunting rifle to something scarier can be printed at home.

This is an exercise in defiance to irrational would-be control freaks. They’re the ones freaking out about this. Not us, we all know you could go to home depot with $15 and come out with an improvised shotgun including powder for ammunition. They didn’t know that, and even if they did, they believed the barrier to entry to be comfortably high enough, this lowers the barrier to entry, and that scares the crap out of them.

You are forgetting one thing. Making a zip gun requires skill. Making this gun just requires that you push “print” on your 3D printer.

Also, since 3D printers are not regulated an arms dealer could theoretically drive around in a van and print guns out the back for any Joe Dirtbag with $25 to spare. As long as they don’t press the print button themselves, or handle the firearm, they haven’t broken any laws. After all, renting a 3D printer is not illegal.

Ok, and who follows laws? Criminals? So, by enacting draconian laws against harmless acts like merely owning an object, who is it you are punishing? How are you helping to “solve crime”? Felons are already banned from owning gun by strict sentances, guess what? They aren’t pursueded, and either by cause or effect, our prosecutors allow this to go on in exchange for pleas that make the districts with high crime problems look good. Sounds like winning system, please tell me more about how Go To Jail For Life ™ has been working to deter crime.

Thanks for reinforcing the pointless idea of gun control which is something you do when addressing the real problem is just too damn hard!

Oh really, t1oracle? It takes so much skill to screw together an end-cap with a screw screwed in it, a pipe, and a shotgun shell with the base the same size as the small pipe? It’s THAT tough to figure out you slide the shotgun shell into the smaller pipe, then use the end cap to slide over it, then simply slam the pipe against something, driving the screw into the primer and making it fire? THAT is a lot of skill? There are kids who aren’t even ten who can figure that out. If you ask me, figuring out where to come up with the money for a 3d printer, where to buy one, how to utilize the files, and how to put it all together seems like a little more skill than just slamming a cap on a pipe that cost a grand total of $7 to make a shotgun shell fire.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1wV3lmbSv4

And using your logic, ANYONE can make guns for anyone. Is a drill press regulated? Nope. Right there is all you need. Go buy an 80% lower, a jig, and a drill press. You can now make yourself an AR-15. No serial numbers. Nothing. The only part that would need to go through a dealer unless it is a private party sale is the lower receiver. ATF has even ruled it is PERFECTLY LEGAL to buy an 80% lower and then buy all the other parts and make it into a functioning firearm. Yes, it is illegal to transfer it to another person, but the same is true using your 3d printed situation. Since you are saying the guy will violate the law, I am assuming he is going to break the same law, just sell something much more durable and more reliable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30i_6awxEG4

Wowzers. I guess we just need to start regulating pipes, drill presses, metal plates, knowledge, and….thoughts? Eh, why cut it short? Let’s just regulate EVERYTHING. Would that finally work? It wouldn’t. The reason for it not working is because you have people out there with a brain that actually functions. They WANT to learn. They develop their own ideas. They don’t stop just because something isn’t easily accessible to them. They are thinkers. They are creators. They will continue to think outside the box.

That has got to be the saddest thing that I have read in a long, long time.

Or perhaps, you throw the term around as if it didn’t matter anymore. But since you’ve been seen by an American Originalist, let me show you the error of your words. If you were anarchists there’d be no constitution. There’d be only chaos.

Do you think you might have been looking for the words “self government?”